I have been clearing out a lot of cupboards of late and putting them on eBay --  it is true what their adverts say, people will buy all sorts of nonsense.

Only last week I sold two broken laptops, and netted £150.  This was stuff that was about to go down to the recylcing center, but on a whim, I threw them on eBay to see what they would do.

Now if you have ever sold anything on eBay you will know you the hassles you have to go through in terms of dealing with your buying public.  You will get the usual email/message asking if you will do a quick sell?  Or if you will accept a payment outside of the eBay system.  Or you will get people saying don't respond to their ebay message as they can't read it!  Hopefully your fraud radar will be beeping like mad at this point and steer well clear.

Now we are getting a new class of spam coming to our eBay messages from Chinese companies advertising how much they can sell you stuff wholesale and what have you.  So just report it you say?

Well, if it were only that simple. eBay support isn't the most responsive and friendly of bureaus.

All you want to do in your Messages panel is a simple little button that says "Mark as Spam".  That would make life easier for everyone.  eBay could then remove it from my Messages there and then, and when they see a pattern coming from others, they could do a major sweep and clear peoples spam Messages before they see them.  This is one of the ways we deal with Comment spam here at Blog-City -- the group effect.

EBay ask you to send them headers of the spam email.  Headers?  It never got to an email, it came from your internal message system!!  Now try and explain this to the customer service person who after 3 days has managed to respond to your reply and you get a blanket response, "please send the headers, we take spam very seriously". 

Selling on eBay is an interesting and exciting experience, but it is a major magnet now for spammers and eBay need to help the vast majority of its users help them fight it.  Give us the tools and we'll help.